How College Challenged My Faith
One of the first things I did when I started college was to join the Christian student group. The only problem with that was it wasn’t strict enough for me because I was in a fundamentalist cult. Many of the students in the Christian group were nice, liberal, open-minded Christians and that was a threat to me.
The first class I took in my undergraduate career was sociology. I didn’t really know what sociology was but it sounded interesting and it sounded like something that I could insert my fundamentalist ideas into and perhaps convert the professor. Looking back at it now, that was sheer arrogance to think that an undergraduate could change the religious beliefs of someone with a Ph.D. The professor converted me. It happened slowly over a period of years, but he converted me.
I put a whole lot of fundamentalist ideas into my first paper, and the professor, rightly so, failed me. I had no citations to back up my claims and it wasn’t scholarly work. It was a disaster. I was mortified. I dropped out of college after that semester. I came back when I decided I wanted to learn. That took a few years. I never forgot the sociology professor. He had challenged everything that I held dear.
I had the privilege of having him for two sociology classes when I started back to college, one on sexuality and one on intersectionality in feminism. I chose sociology as one of my two majors (the other was writing) because I was fascinated with it and it opened up my eyes to the world. This professor had helped change my outlook on life, and it started by failing my first paper.
I’m thankful that college ruined my faith. It needed ruining. College will make us into thinkers if we hang around and that’s what it did for me, turned me into a thinker.
I’m still a Christian, albeit much more like the liberal Christians I first encountered in the college Christian group back in Australia, but I’m no longer a fundamentalist and I have college and a sociology professor to thank for that.